Author: sangeethagci

I have completed many tasks, which are from different projects. This has helped me to understand about various projects that KDE working on.

I just had a bit knowledge on how Free and Open source organizations works, but since past few weeks I have experienced it working with amazing people in the community.

While working on these tasks I have learned many things. I’m loving these program while contributing as well as learning many things in parallel. Great work can be done by loving what we do and that’s what I’m doing so far at KDE. 🙂

Things I learned so far :
1. About IRC. How to get connected to IRC and join various channels related to specific project.
2. How to talk with people to get our question clarified. How to search answers from mailing list. Observing how people communicate over mailing list.
3. I have my own blog now : https://sangeethagci.wordpress.com where I write about all by contributions to KDE.
4. I have used several KDE applications like GCompris, KStars, Minuet, KDE Now, marble maps, Kolf, Konsole, etc.
5. I have installed the KDE in my laptop and also tried out it’s various applications.
6. I loved the plasma. The designs and the color combinations are amazing.
7. While working I have also learned to use tools like GIMP, Inkscape, libre office and few others.

Before GCI, I didn’t had much idea about all these stuffs. But after once started I have beencontinuouslyworking hard to gain the knowledge by working with great people. I also feel great I’m giving back to the community with whatever knowledge I have gained till now. One of the KDE’s projectWikiToLearn says “Knowledge only grows if shared“, this is so nice of it.

I would like to keep contributing to KDE even after GCI. Because I have liked the various projects in KDE and the way we work collaboratively to make the software world better means a lot to me. All the tasks I have worked on till now I have a proud feeling about it that even I have done a small contribution to make the world a better place. 🙂

Edit : 01:01:2017

Here, I would like to talk about my works related to each task :

My first task was related to install the KStars application and explore it features. I liked working on this application since I was always curious to know how the planetary system works and this application helped to understand more about it.

My second task was to explore the WikiToLearn theme and find bugs in them. I was able to find few bugs. I have listed the bugs in the documents : 1 and 2.

My fifth task was to write a blog post on comparing 3 Free Software fundraising campaigns. This task was very much interesting to me since I had talk with many of their community people to know more about how they did their campaign. This is one of the task I enjoyed the most. This took some to get the accurate data and facts with respect to numericals (amount) and other information mentioned.You can read my blog post here : https://sangeethagci.wordpress.com/2016/12/18/3-free-software-fundraising-campaigns/

My ninth task is to write a blog post about my experience in Google Code-in. Which is you are reading right now. 😛Looking forward to complete as many tasks in my limited time and keep contributing to KDE. 🙂

3 Free software organizations which do fundraising campaigns I selected are :

Mozilla

Wikimedia

KDE

For the year 2015 –

Mozilla Foundation :

As I know, Mozilla has one of the biggest community spread across the entire world. This is one of their strong point to do a successful fundraiser campaign.

How did they do their fundraiser campaign ?

1. Mozilla kicked off its annual fund-raising drive by placing the pitch on the home page of Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox browser. Implementing an easy way for people to donate just by clicking on button ($3, $10, $20).

2. They changed their home page of website mozilla.org, where the visitors can donate in a easy way.

3. They have a webpage : https://fundraising.mozilla.org which shows the current amount of donations dynamically. The value changes once any donations are made. They have shown a pie chart which categories the donars by country. Usually United States will be of majority because their targeted audience are US based people for their fundraiser campaign.

4. Campaign on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook. (They started on instagram for current year [2016])

5. Mozilla has large number of local communities. Here, in India, we have around 10 – 15 active regional community spread across the country who also do promotions to Mozilla’s global fundraiser campaign.

6. Since, Mozilla’s mission is spread across for developers, internet activists, academicians, students, teachers, designers, creators, innovators, makers, hackers, tech evangilist, they have more supporters compared to other free software organization. Hence they are more successful in their fundraiser campaign.

1. The Wikimedia Foundation exists to support a global community of readers, contributors, and donors. Hundreds of millions of people are involved in maintaining and nurturing the open knowledge movement. The Wikimedia Foundation is proud to serve, and humbled by, the millions who keep Wikipedia thriving each year with small donations averaging about $15 USD.

2. More than 5 million readers around the world donated $77 million USD in the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2015–2016 fiscal year. We are grateful for all the readers, contributors, and donors who make Wikipedia and our other projects a global home for knowledge and discovery. To continue thriving we must constantly innovate, adapting to the changing needs of our readers and new advances in the technology that powers the Wikimedia universe.

3. Last year, Wikimedia foundation had their campaign on twitter with the hash tag #keepitfree. There were more than 50,000 tweets with this hashtag. This was on of their platform where their got huge support for their campaign.

4. Since wikimedia has huge base of readers, they had mentioned about their campaign on their every wikipage where a user can see it easily. (just like an ad).

5. Similar to mozilla, thier targeted audience were US people. They got around $43 million from their.

6. They also keep track of their readers are which device from ? Like mobile, desktop, laptop, and target these group in a it’s own way.

KDE : (From the year 2014)

1. In year 2014, KDE raised € 22 885.

Some of the unique features KDE did were :

2. Giving away postcards for those who donate.

3. Listing the names with the amount of donations made by each and every person on the website.

GCompris is a high-quality educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10.
I have installed it’s free version of the application on my android phone. I have played many of it’s activities.

It has numerous activities like Tic Tac Toe where I can play with my friend or with the bot, Missing letter, Naming the images, Assembling the puzzles, Finding the differences between the two images. graph coloring, even and odd numbers, activities related to numeric, logic, country/continent/state names, geography and lot more.

You should definitely try this application for children aged between 2 to 10 because they have the lot to learn from this. The will think in a creative way to solve these activities.

Some of the activities which I liked are :

Finding the difference between 2 images :

This activity is very nice because this will definitely improves the observation skills. The child has to observe the 2 images very carefully to find the differences. Sometimes the difference will exist in the smallest component existing the top image which is missing in the bottom image. The child has to concentrate more and search the difference carefully to complete this activity.

Assembling the puzzles :

This is a drag and drop activity, where the child has to drag the parts of the puzzles and assemble them on the screen to get the right image.
Sometimes it is bit confusing but the activity is designed in such a way that, if we go wrong it shows which parts are assembled at wrong position so that we can replace them.

Missing Letter :

In this activity, the child has to fill the missing letter to complete the word shown in the image. This will help the child to discover new words, identify the objects and helps to learn the spelling of those objects. This has around 10 levels where we get different words in each level.

Naming the images :

In this activity, there will be a lot of names will be given, the child has to drag those objects from the top bar and place it above it’s name, This will again help the child to recognize, categorize the objects and names. Helps the child to make out things which we see/use in our day to day life.

Tic Tac Toe :

There are 2 versions of activities here, 1 to play with a friend, another one to play with the bot.
When playing with the friend or bot this will help the child to improve it’s thinking ability. This is more of mind game.Sliding-block puzzle game :

In this activity, there will be a truck which will be blocking the way for the car to move through the gate. The child has to solve this puzzle carefully. The child has to move the truck away from the blocking gate and make a way for the car to move through the gate. Sometimes to make the level harder there will be 2 trucks blocking the gate to solve it hard. This activity helps the child in numerous ways to solve the task.

Falling words :

In this activity, there will a word is shown on top of the screen and the child has to type those letter and complete the word. This will help the child to improve it’s vocabulary and also to discover new words which playing the activity.

Align four :

In this activity you should align the four token in a row and you win. When playing with friends you should be also smart enough to block your friend not to align his four token in a raw. However, it’s pretty much simpler to play with the bot.

Some of the things I loved in this application :

It has numerous activities which are specially designed for children.

Not much bugs in the application.

Application works smooth.

Activities are well described and designed.

There are many authors who have designed these activities.

Good music feature.

Ability to customize the font style, font size in configuration.

Some suggestion to improve :

Improving the UI to give the feel and look of material design on Android app.

Scoring system, where the total points/activities completed by the child can be shown in home/dashboard screen.

Minute is an application developed by KDE community. Minuet aims at supporting students and teachers in many aspects of music education, such as ear training, first-sight reading, solfa, scales, rhythm, harmony, and improvisation.

Below are some of the things I liked and suggestions to improve it’s UI on Android application :

1. Colorful icon but not the application

Splash Screen

I loved the icon of Minuet application on Android. It’s colorful with some shadows giving the material design feel.

By seeing the splash screen, one would definitely expect the application also to be colorful. But it’s not much.
It’s more of black/gray and white application, a bit of colors to buttons.

I would like to see the application like this :

instead of

Giving some colors to icons/texts and changing the nav bar icon randomly for each screen we see in the application.

2. About us icon

First, we need to tap on those 3 dots and tap on About option, which I feel is a not a god UX.
Instead, we can replace by 1 single icon which gives some meaning. Like this :
It is expected by the user that tapping on “i” will give some information regarding the application. So tapping on “i” icon should directly give about us modal instead of another option to tap on.

3. About us modal
I would like to suggest as another UI improvement. To keep our application more colorful as the icon. Let’s change the hyperlink colors from default blue to other colors as shown in above screenshots. User would definitely click on those to colored words to know more

4. Making the navigation tabs collapsible within the same screen

We can have sub-tabs to be collapsible within the same screen as show in above screenshots instead of moving to another tab just to show sub-tabs.

5. Constant navigation bar sizeIt would be good if we keep the navigation bar size constant. It becomes bigger if the title is long and comes to normal size when the title is short.

6. Delete

A backspace is a good option. But what if the user wants to delete the first selected option. He has to backspace all other things. Instead, we can let the user delete which ever he wants by giving a delete icon on top of it.

Also, to give background color to selected option so that it’s highlighted to the user that he has selected the option which he wanted to.

We need to change the colors for “PLAY AGAIN“, “GIVE UP“, BACKSPACE” colors.
All these 3 buttons should not have the same color. Let’s pick any 3 different colors and keep constant for these 3 buttons.

General suggestions :

1. The app works really smooth and cool. I feel it would look really good if we implement above mentioned suggestions.